Tales from Jules: Facts of Life
by TitanFodder
Summary: Jules is an informative person. However, he didn't gain a lot of the craft overnight. You gotta learn a thing or two. No pairings, series of one-shots, rating subject to change. Inspired by true stories of real people.
1. Blackmail: Part One

"Sir, you're not a werewolf. You just have sex with wolf-like espers."

Now that you're asking yourself, "What the hell?", I must say, children of Ivalice, gather around the fire, for I have a tale to tell.

I believe I may have let on that I once worked for the Clan Centurio in Rabanastre for quite some time, as a manager of their 'Customer Service' section of the rental carts and chocobos department. A completely horrendous place to be on the end of customer complaints. Really, it was pretty rough at times to be powerless to help somebody stranded on the side of the road with their family when a mark had attacked them. And while many customer complaints were entirely valid and necessitated some action being taken, there were also many that were just… stupid.

People would check in with me and insist on getting 100% refunds, and sometimes more, for the most amazing things, like when they get their merchant carts stuck in the snow of the Paramina Rift or when they disconnect a fully-loaded weapon and can't figure out how to reconnect it.

But this one guy… he was special.

He called in one night, complaining that his chocobos had died. Apparently killed by a rogue esper attack. Now, we had mobile repair units that would go out to help people that are stranded, but we had a series of criteria that we had to use for determining how to handle every situation, and night-time repairs are just flat-out difficult, aside from simple wheel changes. In this case, with the customer's chocobos dying next door to a hotel, it was a no-brainer; just leave the truck in front of the business it was stuck at, go get a room, and we'll take care of things in the morning, including reimbursing him for his room.

But this customer… he was an angry man. A needy man. He started by insisting that we get help to him immediately to replace the chocobo he had paid for, to which we had to advise that this isn't the kind of fix that can generally be handled at 11pm on a Sunday night. He then insisted that we needed to tow him to his destination, which I believe was several hundred miles away, to which we had to say sorry, but no.

He, of course, had no money for a hotel, which was a frequent concern of our customers, although on a cross-country road trip, you would assume the person would have money for things like that. So I had to get involved to contact the hotel and set up payment from Clan Centurio to the hotel. It was less than an hour later that I had been contacted from the hotel that our customer was attempting to purchase pornography on the hotel TV. Our invoice specifically said we wouldn't pay it, so it had been disabled, but, of course, the customer was in the hotel lobby, arguing that he needed access to the porn channels. So, I now spent several minutes on the phone with the customer, in the hotel lobby, shouting at me that he was entitled to "entertainment of my choosing." This was also when he decided that he was start calling me a "mick", a derogatory term for Rabanastrans. I bit my tongue and continued telling him that no, we weren't going to be paying for his porn. He angrily ended the call, but not before telling me, of course, that "the customer is always right."

I've always hated that phrase because the people who say that are almost always just being unreasonable.

The next morning, the customer that had been in such an incredible hurry to get to his destination was far more agreeable to just wait in the comfort of this hotel to wait for a tow. He was now in contact with our local folks who were arranging everything, so I was actually in the office the next day when his cart was finally picked up. Now, we got into some very interesting details.

I should also tell you, he cleaned out the hotel minibar.

The first tow we sent out to pick up the cart wasn't able to lift it. Now, we're not talking about the kind of tow that picks up your average cart. We're talking about a huge tow easily capable of picking up Archadian aircrafts that had a maximum cargo weight of eighteen thousand pounds. Figuring that there must be a problem with his tow, our driver arranged for another driver to come out, and luckily this guy was driving the kind of tow normally reserved for towing massive amounts of weight, like the entire population of the Eruyt Village. He hooked his wrecker up… and it had a hard time lifting it as well.

This driver was very curious about this truck and pulled it to a weigh station on the way to the repair shop. There, we got the bad news: our customer's cargo weight was over double the maximum allowable. In fact, it was so overloaded, the cart's frame was actually bending, and the chocobos weren't able to pull it, and died straining themselves to do so. In light of this, it was agreed that this was unsafe to continue pulling. It was parked at the weight station and a call was made… that I took.

I called the customer and advised him of the situation, asking what was in the cart. I was told that it was 'just your normal stuff', which clearly wasn't the case. But I had to play along. I advised that we had weighed the cart and it wasn't safe to continue due to the weight and that we would need to help the customer make other arrangements for transporting his 'household belongings." I was subjected to more abuse as he just found every excuse to be upset. He demanded that we provided him as many carts as necessary 'sine you're pussy carts can't take the weight of my stuff', plus drivers and airfare to get him to his destination, as he would no longer be driving. We would also have to reload all his stuff for him. Oh, yeah, and he was also demanding a full refund on the cart rental.

Here, we had to tip-toe around things, as we were customer service, but we also had to protect ourselves a bit. The costs for everything he was asking were extraordinary, on top of the fifty-thousand-dollar cart that was, in the words of our people on the scene, "dead, this cart's trash," as the frame was broken and the entire thing was absolutely ruined.

We told the customer that we would provide him with two carts and two sets of chocobos, free of charge, and we would do the reloading for him, but we couldn't drive the carts for him, he was driving with his wife at the time, we wouldn't pay for any airfare, and we would definitely not be reimbursing him for his cart rental. Oddly, the customer would continually change his demands every time I would tell him how we could help: when I said we would reload his things, he would demand that we not touch his things, instead just towing him to his destination. When I said we could get a cargo company involved and have his belongings shipped to him, he suddenly decided he couldn't bear to be away from his stuff.

In short, nothing made sense about this guy, other than the fact that he purposely wanted to be a pain in the ass.

After we went with our initial idea, it was about an hour later that I received a call from his 'lawyer'. Now, I can't say with any certainty if it was a different guy or if it was the same guy using a different voice, but he began insisting in what can be best described as 'faux lawyer' that his client's demands would be met or Clan Centurio, our mechanics, the weigh station, and I would all be sued. I, of course, referred him to call our legal department, which resulted in the 'lawyer' taking the number and hanging up… then immediately calling me back, telling me that there was nobody in our legal department; I would transfer him, he would hang up on them and call me right back.

Again… a pain in the ass.

When our crew got with the customer and opened the back of the cart, we finally saw what was the problem with the cart: books. Not just some books, not just boxes of books, but the entirety of the back of a 24' Clan Centurio cart was filled, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, with books. Nearly forty thousand pounds of books. It was absurd and entirely not what these carts are designed for.

We could never get an explanation as to what this guy was doing with all these boxes of books, but suffice to say, he killed our chocobos with them.

Now you're probably wondering, "Where's the werewolf part?" Well, that gets really weird. You see, back then, in the early days of the Clan Hall, message boards were all the rage. People would post a message, and a ton of comments would follow it. Well, a member of our marketing department, charged with monitoring message boards and such, discovered that, while we were transferring all these books into two carts, in addition to preparing to ship some to the destination, as the weight was too much for even two carts, our wonderful customer, when not calling me pretending to be a lawyer, was busy posting in every message board he could find about how horrible we were.

So I took a look at a few of his posts, debating if I should post a response, as his were being followed by long threads of 'I had problems as well!', and noticed one that had an odd 'signature' to it: he had a nickname. 'White Wolf Wind', or something like that, and a small map to an angel fire location. So, I followed it.

You can imagine the smile on my face as I saw page after page of erotic fiction hidden there, starring my customer as "White Wolf Wind", a werewolf, engaged in all sorts of tawdry activities with humans, wolves, other werewolves, other forest creatures, etc. It was… really creepy. And it got worse as I dug a little deeper into his letters, profiles and biography there. As I read through it, I began to slowly realize that my customer… didn't view this as fiction. He openly proclaimed that, as night, he transformed into 'White Wolf Wind' and roamed the forests… these were true stories of his adventures.

I sincerely believe he was recounting his sexual escapades with dogs and other people.

The next time he called in, I'm sure you can imagine how much I wanted to just unload on him with my newfound information, but I also knew that I had to be professional.

In the end, we still got screwed by everything. Even after we took a hit for the cart, paid for all the snacks and drinks he took from the hotel, a full day of food and drinks for him, at the most expensive restaurants he could find, gave him two carts for the price of one, paid for people to transfer the books from one truck to another, etc., this fine, upstanding customer continued complaining online, and about a month later he did actually have a real lawyer contact us.

I did get some satisfaction in giving a certain map to our legal department… especially after our customer dropped his case, and we subsequently began going after him for the damages to our cart…


	2. Biology: Part One

Back in my school days' years ago, I had a schoolmate who was insane enough to use blood in a fountain pen. He used mesmenir or hashmal blood, not his own (because we persuaded him not to). He just wanted to see if blood would work in a fountain pen – and found it clotted and clogged up the thing overnight.

Then the oddball schoolmate went around the school labs and found various anticoagulant-type solvents or reagents. Mixed with blood, it worked for maybe two or three days, but the pen's innards also got destroyed by the chemical reaction.

Then he found the only way to use blood for writing was by dip pen, the traditional method.

And then the document stank to high heaven from decomposition, molds and various other disgusting effects.

If blood were an efficient writing substance, ink wouldn't have been invented.


	3. Biology: Part Two

Not technically my idea, but my friends and I pulled it off.

If you knew me as a kid, you'd know that one of my nicknames is Juliet. No, I'm not transgender. There is an actual story behind the name.

When I was twelve, my friend Chloe needed a guy and a girl to go on a double date with her and her crush. All her girlfriends were busy that weekend. One of her other guy friends and I volunteered to help, but we ourselves didn't have dates.

Then, the other guy that volunteered (I think his name was Carter) suggested that one of us pretends to be a girl who's dating the other boy. Did that make sense?

We flipped a coin for who had to be the girl.

I lost.

The day before the date, I went to Chloe's place and borrowed a ton of stuff to make me look like a girl, including makeup, extensions, shoes, nail polish, false eyelashes, and a really flashy green dress. Lucky for Chloe, I hadn't hit puberty yet so I didn't have to shave anything and I sounded pretty close to a preteen girl.

The date was at a small restaurant, and Carter and I actually pulled off being a straight couple. I came up with the name Juliet (after the Shakespeare book) and pretended to be Chloe's cousin from our of town that didn't go to our middle school.

The whole hour and a half at the restaurant, I was alternating between praying that Chloe's date didn't notice I was actually a dude trying to eat without smudging my lipstick.

And it worked! Chloe's date didn't even notice anything strange.

I still have the false eyelashes and the nail polish lasted for a week after that incident. And I kept that green dress because I legit rocked it.

Lucky for me, their second date was private.


End file.
